a mercy toni morrison essay

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Published in 2008, A Mercy is Toni Morrison’s ninth novel. Morrison, both a prolific scholar and author, centers the question of slavery and a pre-racial America in this fictional novel. A Mercy was chosen as one of the best books in the year of its release by the New York Times.

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A Mercy endeavors to explore the experiences of slaves in early America. The narrative frequently changes focus between different characters who live or work for the Vaarks. The primary protagonist is a 16-year-old enslaved girl named Florens . Florens begins the novel on the D’Ortega tobacco plantation in Virginia. There, the D’Ortegas are known for their exceptional cruelty towards their slaves. The D’Ortegas are in a great deal of debt, and the novel opens as a trader named Jacob Vaark arrives at the plantation to collect the money they owe him. Vaark is disapproving of the D’Ortegas, frowning upon their cruelty, arrogance, and political views. The D’Ortegas do not have the means to repay the debt and offer an enslaved person to Vaark instead. The two come across Florens’s mother, who offers her child up to Vaark. Florens believes that in doing so, her mother willfully abandons her; however, Florens’s mother does so to protect her, having recognized a kindness in Vaark that does not exist in the D’Ortegas. When Florens arrives at the Vaark farm in rural New York, life with Jacob and his wife Rebekka is considerably better than that on the plantation.

Two other slaves live on the farm: Lina , an Indigenous woman, and Sorrow , a young girl born from a Black mother and White father who suffers from mental health issues. The Vaarks and their slaves form a strange but functional pseudo-family unit, a phenomenon that was strange for the time. Through interchanging perspectives, Morrison skillfully weaves the personal histories of each character into the narrative. The lived experiences of the characters in the novel allow them to function together relatively seamlessly; they are almost all orphans, and all intimately familiar with abandonment. However, when Jacob Vaark falls ill and dies, a cog in the system comes loose. Fear and panic run rampant on the farm as Rebekka, too, becomes ill. A farm run entirely by women is almost unheard of, and the threat of those who might mean them harm becomes a constant thread of paranoia.

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All of the slaves try their best to help Rebekka get better, but finally, Florens must go to the Blacksmith , a freed Black man whom Florens is in love with. Florens and the Blacksmith had a brief affair the last time he was on the farm, despite Lina’s best attempts to keep her away from him. Lina is distrustful of the Blacksmith, and having practically raised Florens, feels extremely protective over her. Florens is delighted to have an excuse to go and look for the Blacksmith and is more than ready to see him again. After a couple days of walking, Florens arrives at a cottage where she meets Widow Ealing and her daughter. Widow Ealing’s community is enrapt in a hunt for witches, and when the locals arrive to check Widow’s daughter and ensure that she is not a demon, they all become convinced that Florens is the devil due to the color of her skin.

The Widow’s daughter prepares food for Florens and helps her escape. She tells Florens where she can find the Blacksmith. The Blacksmith leaves to care for Rebekka, though he asks for her to stay behind and care for a young boy who has no one else to look after him. Florens worries that the Blacksmith will inevitably choose the young boy over her, and that he will decide to one day abandon her just as her mother once had. Florens becomes increasingly cruel to the boy, and when he begins to cry, she grabs his arm to silence him, breaking it. The boy faints from the pain and the Blacksmith arrives to witness it all. He is furious with her and slaps Florens, telling her to return to Rebekka since she is incapable of reason.

After Florens returns to the Vaark farm, everything changes. The two indentured servants on a neighboring farm, Willard and Scully , share an intimate and romantic relationship. They provide an outside perspective on the marked changes that have occurred in the women on the Vaark farm. Rebekka has become a religious zealot and increasingly cruel towards the slaves, and wants to sell Florens. Florens does not seem to care much about this, spending her days working and her nights in the new, empty house that Jacob had built before his death. There, Florens carves words into the wood, a letter to the Blacksmith about all that has happened. The novel ends with a peek into Florens’s mother’s mindset. Florens’s belief that her mother abandoned her was wrong all along; her mother had given her to Jacob Vaark to protect her. The final lines are a prayer of sorts, with Florens’s mother hoping that her daughter will understand and forgive her one day. 

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Return of the visionary

I n her essay 'Playing in the Dark', Toni Morrison looked back to the founding of America and observed: 'What was distinctive in the New World was, first of all, its claim to freedom, and second, the presence of the unfree within the heart of the democratic experiment.' This sentiment - that ideals of economic and political liberty were dependent on brutal enslavement - is the starting place of all her work, and this, her first novel for five years, is another distillation of it. In her essays and novels, she has pursued - and mostly won - the argument that the history and literature of America were predicated on the exclusion of the black part of its population, that the myths of nation-building contained an explicit or an unspoken 'us' and 'them'. That this book will be published in the week before her nation may choose a President who for the first time could eclipse that divide, who could make 'them' 'us', lends it a fundamental resonance.

In some ways, A Mercy is a prequel to Morrison's most comprehensive and unanswerable expression of those ideas, Beloved, recently voted the greatest American novel of the last 25 years in the New York Times. It is set at a time just before the earliest parts of Beloved, before bonded labour became a principal foundation of American wealth, when that grotesque idea was just forming in the marketplace.

Jacob Vaark enters that marketplace from Europe. He has found his way through Atlantic fog, dropped off at an unnamed coast by unnamed sloopmen, wading 'over pebbles and sand to shore', across mud and swamp grass, over boarded planks finally to a village, mimicking the advance of civilisation. Vaark has no illusion about where he has come to: '1682 and Virginia was still a mess.' Half-a-dozen years before, 'an army of blacks, natives, whites, mulattoes - freedmen, slaves and indentured - had waged war against the local gentry'. This failed 'people's war' produced a thicket of new laws that were to shape the nation's history: 'By eliminating manumission, gatherings, travel and bearing arms for black people only; by granting licence to any white to kill any black for any reason; by compensating owners for a slave's maiming or death, they separated and protected whites from all others for ever.'

Morrison makes Vaark a Johnny Appleseed idealist (she is keen on suggestive names - he is Virginia's Noah: VA's ark). He has a parcel of land to farm, he has notions about how he will cultivate a virtuous fortune and he has advertised for a capable wife from England to share this optimism. The 16-year-old Rebekka duly arrives. When the novel opens, however, Vaark's ideals are floundering: he has lost three sons soon after childbirth; his daughter, aged five, has been killed by a kick from a horse, 'unleavening' his wife. The farm is not as profitable as he had hoped. All this is in his mind as he travels to Maryland to claim a debt from a tobacco plantation owner, a Señor D'Ortega. When Vaark arrives at the plantation, it is clear there is no money to pay him. D'Ortega instead offers him payment in that other fluid currency, human flesh.

Vaark is outraged by this offer. D'Ortega's line-up of two dozen of his chained workers brings to Vaark's Protestant mind a 'silence that made him imagine an avalanche seen from a great distance. No sound just the knowledge of a roar he couldn't hear'. He has a conscience, still. Even so, to avoid embarrassment, he reluctantly receives what's owing to him in the form of a little girl, Florens - her name itself is loose change - whom he spots wearing some of Señora Ortega's cast-off shoes.

This act is the mercy of the book's title. It is a profoundly small mercy, of course, but, at her mother's wish, Florens's life is passed from the cruelties of Ortega's plantation to the relative ease of Vaark's farm. The transaction has exacted another price, however; it has added to the irresolution in Vaark's mind. Why should this Ortega have the big house, and the fine clothes, while he struggles with his farming and restraint? At an inn, he falls into conversation with another man, who sets out to him the flavour of the new economics. The future is in sugar, in molasses, in rum (and, by inference, in mass slave labour). Sugar is not like fur, tobacco or lumber. There is 'no loss of investment. None. Ever. No crop failure. No wiped-out beaver or fox. No war to interfere. Crop plentiful, eternal. Slave workers, same. Buyers eager. Product, heavenly...'

Vaark is tempted by the invisible hand of this new market, not least because geography salves his 'liberal' conscience. 'There was a profound difference between the intimacy of slave bodies at [Ortega's plantation] and a remote labour force in Barbados. Right? Right, he thought, looking at a sky vulgar with stars.'

Investing in the Barbados plantations is one of Vaark's last acts in the novel, but it is a defining decision in American history - it represents the moment when it was determined that the engine of capitalism in the New World would be slave labour in distant lands. Having set up his offshore commodity business - and created the world in which the women in his life will live - we next see him, considerably richer, dying of smallpox, leaving his young wife to farm their estate with the help of their three accommodated girls: Florens, now grown to be a teenager; Lina, their native American servant, taken in as an orphan; and Sorrow, the daughter of a sea captain, made simple-minded from almost dying in a shipwreck, another foundling on whom Vaark took pity. In these four representative souls, Morrison might have you believe, lay the best hopes of the nation.

Each of the women seems locked inside her own head, and inside her own fate. All of them are slaves in different ways. Shipped over from England, Rebekka had to choose between the prospects of 'servant, prostitute or wife', and though horrible stories were told about each of those careers, 'the last one seemed the safest'. Lina has witnessed a fall from the Eden of her childhood - her tribe was wiped out by a plague - and she clings to 'the Mistress' as the only stability in her broken world. Sorrow changes her name over the course of the novel - she has a daughter and becomes Complete. Florens, meanwhile, swaps one slavery for another; she becomes infatuated with the blacksmith who comes to the estate, a freed slave from New Amsterdam, who wants nothing of her submission.

Morrison structures the novel in her familiar manner, giving one chapter by turns to each competing voice, collapsing time frames, seldom letting her characters directly rub up against one another, trapping each of them in their biographies. In this way, she creates something that lives powerfully as an invented oral history and that seems to demand to be taken as a parable, but one whose meaning - which lives in the territory of harshness and sacrifice - is constantly undermined or elusive.

Rebekka's voice is, in the present of the novel, delirious with fever - she has her husband's illness and, as a result, the world of all four women is reeling on its axis. Without the Mistress, none of the servant girls will have a place anywhere and without the assistance of her servant girls, Rebekka will die. It is on these kinds of paradoxes of mutual female dependency that Morrison builds her brief vision of America's genesis. Florens has gone to the blacksmith for help and, in her journey, for a moment, all of her nation's possibilities seem to lie: 'How long will it take will he be there will she get lost will someone assault her will she return will he and is it already too late? For salvation.'

Since winning the Nobel Prize in 1993, Morrison has, not altogether reluctantly, taken on the voice of America's conscience. After the marvels of empathy that were Beloved and, to a lesser extent, Jazz, that public voice has grown - she has sometimes seemed a spokeswoman rather than a writer - and the voice of her novels has become sparer. In this book, a good deal of Morrison's stark, almost biblical imaginative power is on display, without all of her former detailing energy. Nathaniel Hawthorne has become her model in some ways; like him, she is capable of creating fictional environments in which everything can come to seem symbolic. Portentous is not always a comfortable tone, but in the coming American weeks it may well be the appropriate one. The first line of A Mercy? 'Don't be afraid.'

Toni Morrison: A life

Born 18 February 1931, in Ohio.

Educated Cornell University, where she read English.

Married Harold Morrison, whom she divorced in 1964. Two children.

Career 1970 The Bluest Eye

1973 Sula nominated for National Book Award

1977 Song of Solomon

1988 Beloved won Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

1993 Nobel Prize for Literature

2005 Honorary doctor of letters, Oxford University

She says: 'Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created... language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.'

They say: 'In novels characterised by visionary force and poetic import, [Morrison] gives life to an essential aspect of American reality' - Nobel Prize committee

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Relationships in “A Mercy” by Toni Morrison Essay

The novel “A Mercy,” written by Toni Morrison, explores the relationships between four different women. The women portrayed in the story are Rebekka, the wife of the farm owner Jacob Vaark, Florens, a black slave sold to the farmer, Lina, the Indigenous servant, and Sorrow, the woman with an unknown background also owned by the Vaarks after being found on the shore having survived a shipwreck.

Even though the female characters are absolutely diverse, they have many qualities in common. First of all, each of them is absolutely lonely and helpless on her own, second – they all need to please one man. They end up clinging together since that was the only way for them to survive in the America of the 1690s when women’s rights and freedoms were very limited.

Theoretically, there is a hierarchy between the characters. Jacob, who basically owns all of the women, is at the top. Rebekka is the close second since she is the wife of the farm owner. Yet, when she arrives at the Vaark farm, she is completely unaware of how to run it and needs help. Lina, who had come to the farm before Rebekka arrived, is also helpless at her job.

The two women end up forced together as they have similar strengths and weaknesses, and “both are hopelessly ignorant of how to run a farm” (Morrison 69). Over the course of the novel, Rebekka and Lina develop a tight bond of sisterhood, mutual help, and trust.

Lina is practical. She is aware that her wellbeing depends on the Vaarks. Lina becomes a loyal servant and a partner for Rebekka and does her work thoroughly, trying to show as much love and care as possible to her owners. Her relationship with Rebekka evolves as she adopts her new life and becomes protective of it. Lina is conservative.

Having suffered a major loss of her family and tribe, she unconsciously starts to view the farm and people living there as her new tribe. Her indigenous culture becomes obvious in her attempts to form a family-like connection with Florens and Rebekka. At the same time, she is hostile towards Sorrow, probably because she feels that Sorrow is broken inside, which makes her potentially unstable, and Lina is scared of change, she is desperately trying to preserve her newfound stability.

Sorrow does not interact with other women initially; she has her own best friend, Twin. Sorrow stays away from Lina due to the Indigenous woman’s utter hostility. Rebekka becomes especially cold with Sorrow when she starts to suspect that Jacob might be the father of the slave’s unborn baby.

Sorrow’s imaginary friend Twin disappears as soon as she gives birth to her daughter and says, “I am your mother. My name is Complete” (Morrison, 120). This is how she develops a new relationship and loses the need for the previous one. After becoming a mother, Sorrow change. She becomes brave, starts to do chores, speaks with other slaves, and even with Rebekka.

Florens arrives on the farm as a child. She has severe abandonment issues after being given away by her mother, who preferred to keep her baby boy instead. As any person with abandonment issues entering teenage Florens forms unsafe attachments. Her love for the blacksmith turns into an obsession and results in a tragedy as he also prefers a baby boy to her. Lina becomes her caregiver, and Florens perceives the world through Lina’s teachings. Her narration often uses the phrase, “Lina says.”

Lina intends to make Florens less sensitive and warns her about possible dangers. The relationship between them changes when Florens becomes stronger and more independent. The major distress in her relationship with the blacksmith makes her attack him with a hammer: “Seeing you stagger and bleed I run… I have no shoes. I have no kicking heart no home no tomorrow” (Morrison, 138). This makes her shut herself down for any attachments and change drastically, becoming cold-blooded and distant from everyone.

In the novel, Toni Morrison demonstrates the complexity of women’s destinies during the end of the 1600s, putting all of them into equally dependant positions due to their powerlessness. In the story, it is mentioned that the major force that united the female characters was the only man of the house: “As long as Sir was alive, it was easy to veil the truth: that they were not a family—not even a like-minded group. They were orphans, each and all” (Morrison 55). Jacob’s mercy is what brings all of the women to his farm (Womersley par. 3).

In “A Mercy,” women put together under one roof or thrown in the same circumstances start to form mother-daughter relationships such as Florens and Lina, our sister relationships such as Rebekka and Lina, Rebekka and women at the ship, Sorrow and Twin, Florens and Jane. The novel reveals solidarity, which occurs during hard times. Towards the end of the book, women willing to survive to unite. They transform, build a bond, and start to function as a group instead of being separate orphans they initially came to the farm.

Works Cited

Morrison, Toni. A Mercy. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2008. Print.

Womersley, Chris. ‘A Mercy’ by Toni Morrison . 2008. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2020, May 5). Relationships in “A Mercy” by Toni Morrison. https://ivypanda.com/essays/relationships-in-a-mercy-by-toni-morrison/

"Relationships in “A Mercy” by Toni Morrison." IvyPanda , 5 May 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/relationships-in-a-mercy-by-toni-morrison/.

IvyPanda . (2020) 'Relationships in “A Mercy” by Toni Morrison'. 5 May.

IvyPanda . 2020. "Relationships in “A Mercy” by Toni Morrison." May 5, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/relationships-in-a-mercy-by-toni-morrison/.

1. IvyPanda . "Relationships in “A Mercy” by Toni Morrison." May 5, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/relationships-in-a-mercy-by-toni-morrison/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Relationships in “A Mercy” by Toni Morrison." May 5, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/relationships-in-a-mercy-by-toni-morrison/.

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The Revelation of Reading Toni Morrison in Moscow

Kristina gorcheva-newberry on the world expanding experience of the bluest eye.

I first read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye in graduate school. I was frightened by how it made me feel—in awe of the writer’s genius, of her ability to weave together horror and beauty, the mundane and the sublime. I called one of my friends in Moscow and said, “I just read the most gorgeous and terrifying book by Toni Morrison.” And my friend asked, “Who is that?”

The year was 2001, and nobody among my very educated, book-loving cronies in Moscow knew who Toni Morrison was. Russian-speakers remained in the dark, even after Morrison had received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. The next time I traveled back home, I brought copies of her books to my friends, who found Morrison’s novels just as poignant and heartbreaking as I did, her characters looming off pages, alive and unforgettable.

Occasionally, we would gather in my flat, and I would read out loud and translate passages from Morrison’s books, pages and pages of magnificent scenes or descriptions and also those that I found most difficult or tragic or controversial. We would then discuss them, zealously, pointing at the differences or similarities between African American and Russian women, and how little control we still had over our own lives, at the mercy of our government or newly hatched oligarchs.

We compared Morrison’s heroines to Tolstoy’s or Chekhov’s and found them to be just as strong and passionate, imprisoned by their historical past or trapped in the reality of living in a man’s world, where a woman’s body was nothing but a commodity; her fate and worth designated by her father, her husband, her lover, her children, or her community, like a town of Eloe in Tar Baby . There was little empathy in that world, and little glory. But there was friendship, and there was motherly love, and there was the desire to break free from the oppressiveness of our homes and the country that supported patriarchy in all its evident or inconspicuous forms, at home and at work, in science or arts.

For me and many of my female friends, Morrison’s books became portals into a new, freer world of self-discovery and womanhood; they peeled away the scar tissue that our hearts, our souls had grown like a protective shell, a carapace, in order not to be crushed, annihilated by a male fist. Her books gave us, if not solace, then hope, hope that one day we would be able to speak our minds, to express what we truly felt, to chart our own destiny, and to denounce the current regime that continuously suppressed, suffocated women. After reading Morrison, my friends and I grew courageous, ready to defend one another, to fight for our right to birth not only children, but books, music, paintings; to fly planes, perform surgeries, make scientific discoveries; to be regarded not only as nurturers, Morrison’s “swamp women” deified by their “ancient properties,” but as artists and politicians, the architects of our own lives.

Even now, years later, when I reread the passage about soldier ants in Tar Baby , I can’t help but hold my breath and press the book closer to my heart because, once again, Morrison had written about me—a proud laboring insect, a determined female who has so much to do “bearing, hunting, eating, fighting, burying….”

Morrison’s unfathomable ability to make us empathize with her characters on a very personal, intimate level allows us to inhabit her fictional world, become an organic part of it. No matter how strange or harrowing that world is, as readers we have no choice but to surrender to the bewildering power and beauty of her language, her striking command of the narrative art. We embrace her rich, thriving landscapes so fully, so completely, the remarkable interiority of her worlds, we can’t separate ourselves from them or the characters—male or female, old or young. Just like them, we suffer and fight and plead, choking on anger or tears.

The more we read her novels, the deeper we descend into her worlds, where we turn into Sula, Nel, Pilate, Milkman, Jadine, Son, Sethe, Paul D, or little Pecola who prays to God to change the color of her eyes. Page after page, we find ourselves transfixed and transformed by the sound of Morrison’s voice, so proud and distinct in all of her work. And I think: How fortunate we are to have been graced with her presence, her literary genius, her humanity, which she continues to share with us, her soul hovering about the universe, immortal.

I met Toni Morrison twice, and both times, when she appeared, she reminded me of a great ship entering a town’s harbor. She made everything look small—the stage, the room, the building, the people inside, the trees outside. When I finally dared to speak to her, I found myself stumbling for words. Not only was I afraid that she wouldn’t understand my accent, I also kept asking myself: What could one possibly say to the sun, or the moon, or the universe that might seem important or even necessary? In October of 2012, Morrison was honored at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. I carried a bouquet of fifty red roses to a private reception preceding the official ceremony. A crowd gathered. Morrison had trouble walking and was slowly wheeled out to the middle of the room. For a moment, all I could hear was my heart thrashing about my chest, exploding from pride and joy and from the sight of her face, so close to mine. I kneeled beside her chair and laid the roses in her arms.

I said, “What I know about life I’ve learned from my mother. But what I know about fiction writing I’ve learned from you.” She studied my face, her gaze heavy but also warm, like a late-afternoon sun. When she asked whether I’d brought vodka, I shook my head, embarrassed, mumbling that had I known, I would’ve brought the best vodka, the best pickles, the best pumpernickel bread. “What kind of Russian are you? If you don’t have anything to drink?” she asked and then laughed—a hearty, full-throated laugh, which made me feel awkward but also known, understood. I have never forgotten that feeling.

My debut novel, The Orchard , couldn’t have been conceived or written had I not read Morrison’s books, especially The Bluest Eye . I was born and raised in the Soviet Union, a country that forbade any sexual discourse. Before perestroika, in novels and short stories, as well as in movies and plays, sex scenes were omitted, or they happened to be so chaste, depicted in sighs and whispers. No one talked about rape, incest, pedophilia, or women-trafficking, although we knew all of that existed. The Orchard —among many things—is a story about a young girl, Milka, neglected and abused by her parents. She carries a shameful secret, one she doesn’t share with anybody, not even with Anya, her best friend and the novel’s narrator. When Anya learns about Milka’s predicament, the tragic circumstances of her life, she refuses to believe her, and later feels helpless and aggrieved trying to help her friend.

Just like Claudia, the narrator of The Bluest Eye , Anya tells the story through a prism of memories, resurrecting the ghosts of her youth, the years she spent together with Milka, dreaming about boys and foreign lands, unaware that soon nothing would remain of their dreams but the dumb, “ unyielding earth .” Neither Claudia nor Anya can explain why things happened the way they did, but we, as readers and human beings, must “ take refuge in how .”

Writers like Toni Morrison are the universe’s response to everyday ugliness and the cruelty of existence, to wars, murder, genocide, torture, rape, gender and racial discrimination. They provoke and astound us, lure and haunt us; they “gather” us, “the pieces” we are, and “give them back” to us “in all the right order.” Such writers search for wounds to expose, for souls to heal; they bear witness, unveiling a higher truth, one that we might have never discovered or have discovered too late. They show us who we are as a species—weak, vulnerable, unfaithful, ignoble, but also those capable of surviving any tragedy, any loss, any pain; of building cathedrals and spaceships. Such writers remind us that at the beginning there was sound , and then there was word , and that if they dared to write those stories, we should dare to read them because in doing so we can recover, reclaim our humanity.

I was visiting my homeland when Toni Morrison died, in August of 2019. All day long my friends called or sent me messages with their condolences; they knew what she meant to me. In our Moscow flat, my mother lit a candle next to Morrison’s picture on the cover of Song of Solomon . My heart wept; my soul orphaned forever. As the evening drew closer and the darkness settled in the sky, I walked to the kitchen, poured two shots of vodka, and sliced two pieces of pumpernickel bread. I imagined her sitting in front of me, the glass raised in her strong, beautiful hands. I imagined her face—so intelligent, so sincere, so warm. I remembered Milkman whispering to Pilate, “ There must be another one like you … There’s got to be at least one more woman like you. ” I lifted the shot glass, saluting my invisible guest, my mentor, my muse. “No, there isn’t,” I said. “There isn’t anybody like you on this earth.”

__________________________________

The Orchard by Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry is available now from Ballantine Books. 

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Wealth of Geeks

A Beginners Guide to Toni Morrison

Posted: March 21, 2024 | Last updated: March 21, 2024

One of the world’s most famous and influential authors, Toni Morrison’s canon spans decades and topics. Morrison’s work dedicates itself to examining the Black American experience, from short stories to essays and speeches to her beloved novels. The author mines the systems of racism and how they can be fixed and explores the depths of complex human emotions like grief, trauma, love, and joy.

Morrison is the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Black woman to serve as senior fiction editor for Random House, and an incredible force known as the “ Conscience of America. ” 

1. The Bluest Eye (1970)

Morrison’s debut novel,  The Bluest Eye , occasionally appears on the banned books list because of the controversial topics it explores, such as incest, racism, and child molestation. Set in Lorain, Ohio, the novel follows the life of Pecola, a young Black girl growing up in the United States after the Great Depression.

Unafraid of difficult conversations, Morrison doesn’t shy away from uncomfortable subjects and allows those uncomfortable subjects to guide her into an important conversation about perception beyond beauty and how perception can negatively impact us all. Pecola, the main character, desires nothing more than blue eyes, but the blue eyes she wants represent her desire to see the world differently just as much as she would like to be seen differently.

2. Sula (1973)

Sula tackles the ideas of gender, race, community, and that strange place between “good” and “evil” as Morrison tells the story of Nel and Sula in the small Black community of Bottom, Ohio. 

Using Nel and Sula as opposing characters, Morrison makes room for a conversation about “good” and “right” versus “evil” and “bad.” She sets up a dynamic that specifically allows readers into the moment that divides the two women, which will provide the framework for the judgment of their adulthood to allow readers room to formulate their thoughts on Nel and Sula outside of the community’s judgments.

While Morrison still examines race in  Sula , the deeper purpose of the novel rests in exploring one’s self, the enduring love of friendship, and how our histories affect us all.

3. Song of Solomon (1977)

Song of Solomon follows the life of Macon “Milkman” Dead III, a Black man living in Michigan who seeks to understand his ancestry. At its core,  Song of Solomon , the title pulled from a book of the Bible, confronts racism and the intergenerational scars it leaves. 

While Morrison’s work mostly consists of female protagonists,  Song of Solomon tells the story from Milkman’s perspective. In Conversations with Toni Morrison , she wrote, “I chose the man… because I thought he had more to learn than a woman would have. I started with a man and was amazed at how little men taught one another in the book… So that the presence of Pilate, and the impact that all the other women had on Milkman’s life, came as a bit of a surprise to me.” Though it might not be told through a woman’s perspective, Song of Solomon is a powerful story to explain the oft-overlooked significance of Black women in the Black man’s experience.

4. Tar Baby (1981)

In her fourth novel, Morrison explores the intersections of race and privilege, wealth and class, and love and reality. 

In  Tar Baby , Morrison puts Black and White relationships front and center and, in doing so, allows room to play with and peel back the layers of the Black female experience in a racialized world. Tar Baby is a more metaphorical examination of the racism of gender and race, with the more literal examination focused on identity.

To read  Tar Baby is to understand Morrison’s transition from the literal and bold statements she made in her first three novels. 

5. Recitatif (1983)

“Recitatif” focuses on Twyla and Roberta, two girls who meet in a children’s shelter. One girl is Black, and the other is white, though Morrison intentionally forgoes explaining which is which. Twyla and Roberta stay friends throughout their time at the shelter but eventually go their separate ways.

They reunite multiple times in their lives, many times at high tension points in racial relations in the United States, and they continue to explore their relationship with one another because of and despite their race and the climate of the country. 

6. Beloved (1987)

One of Morrison’s most famous novels,  Beloved, tells the story of Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman living in a haunted Cincinnati home. The novel grapples with the trauma of slavery and what that does to individuals and families.

The non-linear narrative follows Sethe and her daughter, Denver. Eight years before the start of the book, Sethe and Denver lost Baby Suggs, Sethe’s mother, and Howard and Buglar, Sethe’s sons, ran off. At the start of the book, Paul D., a formerly enslaved man who was enslaved on the same plantation as Sethe, arrives. He quickly moves in with Denver and Sethe, and a few days later, a strange woman named Beloved arrives. Paul D. and Beloved butt heads throughout the novel, and as tensions rise in the house, the entire household risks falling apart at the seams.

Beyond the fact that  Beloved stands as Morrison’s most famous work, it earns a spot on any Morrison beginner’s reading list because of the challenge reading it offers.  Beloved is not easy. It defies the “warm and fuzzy” feelings fiction so often provides. In  Beloved , Morrison leans into the teaching and less into the gratification, hoping that readers understand humans as flawed, complex, and not always “good.”

7 . Jazz (1992)

Jazz plays out against the backdrop of the Harlem Jazz Age of the 1920s. Morrison explores another non-linear narrative as she tells the story of a love triangle between Violet, Joe, and Dorcas.

As the second in Morrison’s  Beloved trilogy,  Jazz continues the theme of violence as romance and the challenging ways that love works in life. Critics have called Jazz one of Morrison’s most challenging works as it seeks to cover a lot in a short period. Still, Morrison also said it was her favorite novel to write, earning it an essential spot on any Morrison lover’s reading list.

8. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992)

Morrison’s first work of nonfiction, Playing in the Dark, explores “the effect that living in a historically racialized society has had on American writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries .” She writes about the place of Black Americans in the overall American literary landscape, exploring the way white authors represent them and the way Black people represent themselves.

As a Black woman author writing in a post-Civil Rights Movement era, Morrison’s perspective on whiteness and the literary imagination couldn’t be more important. In addition to her experience as a writer, Morrison served as the senior fiction editor for Random House and deeply understood how whiteness affected literature, making her particularly well-poised to dive deep into the conversation.

9. The Nobel Lecture in Literature (1993)

In 1993, Toni Morrison became the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Upon accepting her award, Morrison gave an incredible speech to the gathered audience in Stockholm, Sweden. The speech she gives tells a folk story that serves as a representation of the work Morrison sought to accomplish with her writing.

While her Nobel Prize speech might not feel as grand as some of her other writings, it still deserves a read by anyone seeking to get to know Morrison’s writing and her canon overall. Even in her death, her incredible, history-making success as a writer deserves to be celebrated at every opportunity.

10. Arguing Immigration: The Debate Over the Changing Face of America (1994)

This essay collection spans political parties and covers a host of issues. While Morrison didn’t write all of  Arguing Immigration , she contributed an essay titled “On the Backs of Blacks,” which confronted the United States’ systemic historical racism.

Morrison’s essay alone puts  Arguing Immigration squarely into the “must-read” category for Morrison’s canon, but what makes it stand out especially is how the book serves as a representation of how Morrison continued to work in conversation with the world around her even as she moved back in time to plumb the depths of history for understanding.

11. The Dancing Mind (1996)

In 1996, Morrison accepted The National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.  The Dancing Mind collects Morrison’s speech on the importance of writing, the challenges, and the beauty of writing.

Reading  The Dancing Mind allows audiences to understand Morrison’s perspective on the art of writing. Reading this book allows for a look behind the curtain of her craft and stands out as especially essential for her fans, who are also aspiring authors.

12. Paradise (1997)

Morrison’s first novel, after winning the Nobel Prize, centers on the town of Ruby, Oklahoma , an all-Black town founded by the descendants of formerly enslaved individuals.  Paradise completes Morrison’s  Beloved trilogy and, like the two other titles in the series, examines the idea of violence as love. 

In this final installation, Morrison explores religion and holiness in a way none of her other novels quite manage. Paradise centers on a building that historically served as a Native American boarding school. These institutions were notorious for the trauma they inflicted, and then they became a haven for women on the fringes of society. 

13. The Big Box (1999)

Morrison’s first illustrated children’s book tells the tale of three children confined to a cardboard box by adults. The children want freedom and to express themselves, but they have to figure out how to do so within the confines of the cardboard box.

Not all titles by famous authors have to be serious, and while  The Big Box certainly possesses underlying adult themes, overall, it feels fun and lighthearted. When diving into an author’s canon, reading their off-the-wall, out-of-the-norm titles serves just as important of a purpose as reading their prize winners.

14. Love (2002)

Set in a small town in Ohio,  Love tells the story of Christine and Heed, two women brought together by their love for the same man, Bill Cosey. Christine, Cosey’s granddaughter, and Heed, his widow, once loved one another, but after a fight divides them, they have to learn how to live with each other in Cosey’s mansion after his death. Confronted with the pressures of society as well as the other women of Cosey’s life, the two women face their demons and struggles.

Love presents exactly what the title would suggest – many forms of love. Throughout the novel, the emphasis on platonic and self-love takes center stage. While this novel didn’t receive the critical acclaim others did, it still can’t be missed in a quality read of Morrison’s work.

15. Remember: The Journey to School Integration (2004)

Over decades, Morrison collected countless archival photos that depicted major historical moments in the work to desegregate school systems. Remember tells the fictional story of the children who experienced schooling in the era of “separate but equal.” The fictional representation of the children allows audiences to enter an otherwise underexplored perspective.

Reading Morrison’s take on a child’s perspective during an incredibly traumatic time in American history allows audiences to understand both the time and Morrison’s feelings on desegregation. 

16. What Moves at the Margin (2008)

This collection of Morrison’s non-fiction writing gathers her essays, reviews, and speeches from 1971 to 2002. The first section, “Family and History,” includes writings about Black women, Black history, and her own family. The second section, “Writers and Writing,” explores writers she admired and books she reviewed or edited at Random House. Finally, “Politics and Society” allows Morrison to share her feelings on the role of literature in the greater American society. 

Getting the best understanding of a writer and their ability requires reading all of their work, even their speeches or the reviews they wrote for other authors. Truly knowing them as a writer and author begins with digging into the work that doesn’t get as much exposure as their popular works. Morrison’s  What Moves at the Margin allows readers to see into her mind more and her character’s less. 

17. A Mercy (2008)

In  A Mercy , Morrison traces the evils of slavery back to the budding nation’s earliest days, furthering the work she did in  Beloved by examining a fraught mother-daughter relationship and the effects of trauma through generations. Set in a small town in Oklahoma,  A Mercy follows the story of Florens, a young enslaved woman sold to Jacob Vaark, an enslaver who seems to collect women, including his wife, whom he purchased. 

A Mercy reaches further in history than any of Morrison’s other novels and feels almost like a tie that brings together all of her other novels. 

18. Burn This Book: Notes on Literature (2009)

Edited and contributed to by Toni Morrison,  Burn This Book: Notes on Literature explores censorship and the value of the American right to free speech. The essays cover a range of topics, all relating to literature and how authors exercise their right to free speech, even as they challenge censorship and how their speech is hindered.

Sure, Morrison’s essay contribution to  Burn This Book can’t be missed, but the most important reason to read it lies in the fact that she edited the collection. She selected all the essays, choosing exactly what she knew would connect everything and tell the story of literature that she sought to express.

19. Home (2012)

Morrison tackles the United States’ treatment of Black veterans in  Home , a novel centered on Frank Money and his relationship with his family. Frank comes home from the Korean War only to realize that nothing about the status of Black men in the United States changes, even as veterans. Returning to his small hometown in Georgia to rescue his sister, Cee, from an abusive situation, Frank must confront the physical and mental scars of his time at war and his subsequent return home. 

Home addresses PTSD in Black soldiers in a way so few novels do. Morrison beautifully weaves together the systemic oppression and racism Black people endured in the South with the painful and challenging situation that Black veterans endured when they returned from the war.

20. God Help the Child (2015)

The last novel Morrison wrote, God Help the Child, explores childhood trauma and the way it shapes lives. The story focuses on Bride, a woman with skin so dark it almost appears blue. A successful, bold, and beautiful woman, Bride struggles internally with the effects of her mother’s abuse. Light-skinned and angry at her child, Bride’s mother failed to offer her the sort of love and kindness she needed until Bride told a lie that changed the life of a woman and forever affected her own.

At the core of God Help the Child rests an understanding of colorism that Morrison navigates incredibly. She examines the way colorism exists as systemic in the wider community of the United States while also examining how it impacts Black people within Black communities specifically.

21. The Origin of Others (2017)

In this non-fiction work, Morrison tackles the idea of the “Other,” exploring how and why Othering occurs and addressing why it plays such a big role in her writing. She digs into the subjects and situations that impact her work, including race, fear, love, borders, and the human condition.

In any upper-level English course, the word “Other” (capital “O”) often gets bandied about. That “Other” comes under incredible scrutiny in  The Origin of Others . Morrison does some of her finest academic, exploratory work in this book. She leaves nothing on the table, digging into every situation and setting to get to the heart of “Other.” 

22. Mouth Full of Blood (2019)

Mouth Full of Blood collects four decades’ worth of Morrison’s non-fiction work into one edition. The book covers everything from her speech to graduates and visitors at America’s Black Holocaust Museum, a prayer for those lost in 9/11, her Nobel lecture, a eulogy for James Baldwin, and so much more.

Released the same year Morrison died,  Mouth Full of Blood is a crucial read for many reasons, but most importantly because it collects never-before-published non-fiction that reflects huge moments in literary history, world history, and Morrison’s personal life. To read Mouth Full of Blood is to understand Morrison.

23. Goodness and the Literary Imagination (2019)

In a deep and powerful exploration, Morrison digs into what goodness is, where it comes from, and how it exists in literature and the literary imagination. Morrison mines handfuls of texts for the essence of and creation of literary goodness, seeking it in texts from across time.

So many of Morrison’s novels confront the idea of “goodness,” and so it feels like a natural next step that she would explore “goodness” in a non-fiction setting.  Goodness and the Literary Imagination focuses all of Morrison’s fiction work into a beautifully crafted, academic exploration that continues and completes the hard work her fiction began.

24. The Source of Self-Regard (2019)

The Source of Self-Regard pulls a smaller and more concise selection of Morrison’s best non-fiction works, hitting the highlights and collecting them all in a slim, accessible edition. The curated selection brings together what many consider the essential Morrison works.

While nothing new comes from  The Source of Self-Regard , the book’s power lies in the precise selections to create the title. Published in the year of Morrison’s death, the book is a tribute to the incredible work completed throughout her career .

25. Morrison’s Eternal Influence

Taught in classrooms worldwide, Toni Morrison’s titles bring together her singular experience as a Black woman and a literary giant and the Black experience throughout the United States. Morrison’s steadfast, unwavering desire to truly understand and examine the Black experience will keep her forever as a pillar of American literary influence and one of the world’s most incredible women.

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From our archives: A 1981 interview with Toni Morrison

The award-winning author Toni Morrison died Aug. 5, 2019. We're reposting this 1981 interview conducted shortly after her fourth novel, "Tar Baby," was published. 

• By Maggie Lewis Staff writer

August 7, 2019 | New York

The following is a reprint of a  1981 article "Toni Morrison; writing from the inside out."

"Stuff." That's what Toni Morrison's newest novel, "Tar Baby," is full of -- in the best sense. In the rich sense you get from the way she says "stuff." She's talking about how in "Tar Baby" the trees and river of the jungle have opinions about everything. Even the butterflies hang on the curtains and gossip.

This is not just to be cute, says this winner of a 1977 National Book Award for her novel "Song of Solomon." "Tar Baby" is the fourth in a string of novels drawn from black life. It is the most ambitious, but it has the personality and lyricism of her first, "The Bluest Eye."

"Stories are told for reasons other than information," Morrison continues. "That's the way people learn things. That's the way the Bible is; the story is trying to explain the universe."

"Since I had important information, I just tried to put it together in a way that could be absorbed. . . . Even the most innocent story is full of stuff that is really important information, the way dreams are." When she says it, the word is not a catchall. She leaves some air around it in a sentence, comes down on it, and it's specific, representing a wealth of things close to one's heart -- in her work, close to the hearts of black people -- that musn't get lost.

In "Tar Baby," it starts with the champion daisy trees, who are muttering because their companions have been chopped down to make way for houses on Isle des Chevaliers in the Caribbean. It continues with the "poor, insulted, brokenhearted river . . . poor demented stream," which, because its course was changed by excavations, has sulkily turned into a tar pit. All of this Morrison tells with grace, economy, and many voices. Voices of trees, voices of the river.

When the champion daisy trees were gone "and houses instead grew in the hills, those trees that had been spared dreamed of their comrades for years afterward and their nightmare mutterings annoyed the diamondbacks who left them for the new growth that came to life in spaces the sun saw for the first time."

Smarting trees and a sulking river could be terribly cute, if it weren't for the way Morrison gets away with it.

"It is a getting away," she says. "I love it. I like the risk. I like walking the edge. You could fall off into maudlin sentimentality at any moment, and sometimes one trips and falls, but I don't care. That's where I want to be when I write."

Talking about walking the edge, she has traced the edge of her desk blotter in the corner office at Alfred A. Knopf, her publisher, where she is doing the afternoon's interviews, and now she presses an imaginary spot on the blotter, pointing to where she wants to be. She is gazing down over beautifully rounded cheekbones. She looks me in the eye, still pointing. Do I know what she means?

She looks immensely powerful sitting behind that huge desk, but I find I am totally off-guard. In fact, I am leaning toward her, as if for warmth, as if she's loaning some of this sense and strength to me. A very womanly woman, she looks large, vivid, and dark against the pale Manhattan skyscrapers that seem to flank her behind the office's wraparound windows. Her photographs show a stonily strong face. But in person, it keeps moving -- from glee, to a frown, to laughs, keeping up with her singing voice, which can suddenly dwindle to a fluffy little whisper. In person she looks beautiful but not so awesome. It's just a different kind of strength.

For someone with such unique -- and, she feels, urgent -- stories to tell, she spends a lot of time helping others find their voices. Her first book was not a novel, but "College Reading Skills," published in 1965. She teaches at Bard College in New York and also works as a senior editor at Random House. It's not uncommon for her to edit other writer's manuscripts and work on one of her own books all in the same day.

"I think of it sort of like the difference between the skill you need to catch a fish as opposed to the skill you need to cook a fish," she says. "People who are great cooks don't necessarily know how to get it out of the water. People who can get it out of the water don't necessarily know how to cook it. And some people can do both. They can catch it, and they can cook it, and it's almost like that. . . ."

"I'm not a frenzied worker. I get it done, but I don't sweat over it. I can wait. There's a certain kind of repose that operates."

It operates on her listeners, too. And on her readers.

The thoughts of trees and butterflies in "Tar Baby," far from sounding whimsical, have power. They function as a chorus, warning, bemoaning, commenting. "I loved the classics when I was in school. There was this incredible thing the Greeks did, not only in Homer and the Iliad, but also in the plays, because they could use the chorus. And they said . . . " -- she makes a desperate, quick gasp, and her voice comes out high, like a little girl -- "'Don't do it! Oh, stop! That's your Ma!' And you feel this complexity. That's what makes human beings more interesting than cabbages. Because they have the capacity to infuriate and to delight in one stroke, and there is no one thing going."

Just so, there are many things going in "Tar Baby." And the crimes and betrayals are on a classical scale. A mother has abused her child. A young black woman has denied her history. A young black man has killed his wife because she was unfaithful and has been traveling ever since. The earth, trees, and butterflies comment, and you settle down and listen. Powers are being spoken of, secrets told. You lean toward the source.

"If you cut the avocado tree or the champion daisy tree or whatever, they're wounded," she says, "so that there is this intimacy between what everybody's doing and the earth, so that the whole implication of the ancient qualities of tar can be understood in that context as a real thing."

Tar is one of the strongest voices in the chorus. Among other things, Morrison is retelling the Tar Baby story from black folklore, in which a rabbit stops to talk to a baby made of tar. It doesn't answer him, so he socks it and gets stuck to it. He is almost caught by hunters but escapes into a briar patch. It was told as a Br'er Rabbit story, but it is older than that. Older, Morrison says, than Beowulf.

Connecting the story to our times, she came up with Jadine, a pretty, Sorbonne-educated black fashion model. She is visiting her aunt and uncle, a cook and a butler in the Caribbean home of Valerian Street, a retired candy manufacturer, and his wife, Margaret, a former beauty queen. Jadine is employed as Margaret Street's companion; Valerian has paid the bill for Jadine's education. She is also the tar baby on whom Son, a black seaman who has jumped ship, gets stuck when they fall in love. There is also real, natural tar in this story. Jadine falls into a tarpit made because the river sulked. The tar may just be saying to her "Oh stop! And at the end of the book, we see Son running, "Lickety-lickety-lickety split."

This old story, like the ancient chronicle of humans tampering with paradise, is where Toni Morrison likes to be, too. "I know how to concoct a nice little avant-garde story, but I'm not interested in that at the moment. . . . I want to dust off what was already there, turn it up, and shine it up. And let's take a look at that and see if it has anything to do with the way we live.

"There's a quality of not having any past -- not just for blacks, just people in the country. Nobody is from anywhere. This is a country of orphans and immigrants and people who just refuse to think about the Old World. . . . The insistence on no past, the cult of the new and the young, and the insistence on 'innocence' that means 'eternally stupid' is . . . one of the characteristics of this country."

She points out that most immigrants to America fled the blights and pogroms and poverty of their old countries, cutting themselves off. Blacks were forcibly cut off, prevented from keeping most of their culture, even though they hung on to vestiges. Now she sees those fragments being destroyed by the same forces that brought her up to the 21st floor of Alfred A. Knopf for this interview, and into her own office at Random House, downstairs, when she's not busy being lionized. Forces called "success."

"There's a strong tendency on the part of black people, particularly us who are upwardly mobile," she says, "to do the same thing that upwardly mobile national people in this country do, which is: Get rid of it. You don't want to hang on to the Italian language, you know. You speak it at home, but, you get out in the corporation, you drop that." So do blacks as they rise in class, she says. "They lose a lot of good stuff," she concludes, coming back to that word that sounds rich, attractive, meaningful.

Which is why Morrison has those trees cry out -- to insist on a connection between man and the earth. Her book also insists on a connection between a people and their history. In it, the central conflict is between Jadine, who has lost the stuff of black culture, and Son, who has kept it but has become an outlaw.

Son has natural, simple reactions to events, and is almost magically in touch with his past and his people. He keeps prescribing old-fashioned remedies for problems: banana leaves for bunions, mirrors to keep out soldier ants.

Jadine is out of touch with her past, as a description of her in a French edition of Vogue makes almost tauntingly clear. You realize when they travel to Son's poverty-stricken hometown in Florida how alien it is to her. Son, painfully in love with her, denounces her for it.

But Morrison withholds judgment.

"That's classic," she says of that episode. "I wanted to present it in such a way that you could see why [Jadine] didn't like [Son's home]. You didn't like it, either. I don't like it very much. . . . For [Son] it was overly romantic. It's sort of a cul-de-sac, a prison rather than a lodestone or an anchor. But she can't live there. That's problematic for 20th-century black people."

The ideal, she says, would be for Jadine to be able to go there, accept the poverty, and live in her world. For Morrison, herself, "I have to be able to live in my mother's house and work at Random House." And say "stuff" 21 floors above Manhattan and have it understood.

"Everything in the past wasn't wonderful," she continues, speaking of black history. "Some of it was awful. But the points is to know what it was. You can use it. You don't have to repeat it. . . .

"I know there are certain kinds of characters in my work that are socially unacceptable people." She laughs, no doubt thinking of any number of lunatics and misfits who wander, crying and acting up, through her crowded novels. "That's all in the same groove. You can't drop these people because they had bad manners. They are us, and the feeling of the ancestor is there. You have to bring them back to life, if you've killed them. We may have done that, and they must be OUT-Raged." The word is sharp but not loud. It gives a listener pause.

The fact of the leisurely existence of Valerian and Margaret Street in "Tar Baby," supported by black servants they take advantage of, is like the unthinking attack on the river. There is a sense of outrage, but it is the reader's, never the author's.

Is she herself outraged?

"Anger and hatred are such a tiny thing to bring to your writing," she says to the cautious question. "Passion, yes. I can feel something very deeply. In order to make the reader feel something very profound, I have to provide you with just enough of it. If I hide it under a layer of anger, you will see anger , but you won't see the thing.

"If I want to tell you that it hurts, I have to make you feel that. I can't just say: "It hurts, it hurts, it hurts.' It has to hurt you. That's the only way you can feel what I feel. . . ."

In her first novel, "The Bluest Eye," published in 1970, she described some children visiting the mother of one of them, who is a live-in maid for a white family. Her little girl knocks a blueberry cobbler off the table. The mother, furious, tells them to get out. Just then, the young daughter of her boss comes in. The cook makes a fuss over the white child, ignoring her own children.

"'Who were they, Polly?'" the white girl asks, referring to the black children.

"'Don't worry none, baby'" these children hear her saying, as they step out the door.

"The scene is from the point of view of the children, so that you feel their pain, not just as little girls, but in a racial sense," Morrison says. "Another way to do that is to talk that out, and say, 'Now, you know . . .'" -- she puts on a low, solemn "explaining" voice. "I make more comment by [showing] how awful it is for the children. It's more effective that way. Suddenly, you're in somebody else's shoes."

What makes "Tar Baby" such a wonderful book is the way that Morrison, like Homer, gets into everybody's shoes. She remarks on how one even feels sorry for Cyclops, and how important that is. And so what hurts the blacks and what hurts the Streets are both moving to the reader.

"I want to see them from the inside," Morrison adds. "This business of developing character, for me, is a long process . . . sort of like what an actor or actress does when they have a part to learn. . . . So I do that first and begin to imagine all sorts of things that I don't put in the book -- their shoe size and what kind of underwear they probably wear, what kind of deodorant they would use, and how they would do this or that. . . . Then I have them. Then they become alive, and the language becomes their language, their perceptions of what they see. . . . So I have to do that for each one."

She sometimes goes through this process and writes a conversation twice, once from each side.

Isn't that a lot of work?

"That's lunacy, actually," she responds. It was hard doing this for the Streets in "Tar Baby," she says, but in each character she found something she felt for. She talks about the characters as if they already existed, and she just met them somewhere. She thought Margaret Street was quite boring, until she saw her as the only beautiful red-headed child in a large family of plain brunettes. Then she felt how strangely people would look at her. And she describes the "afterboom" Margaret feels, alone in the large, vacant rooms she inhabits as Valerian's wife, sort of an oppressive silence. She can actually make you understand the fear and weakness that led Margaret Street to commit her own particular heinous crime.

Morrison talks about villains: "The pure saint or the pure villain is not interesting. But they are interesting when you see the other side. Something interesting happens with Svidrigailov in 'Crime and Punishment.' He's really the arch villain; I mean, Mephistopheles isn't as awful as that. But then when he starts thinking about suicide and his life is awful and he's ashamed, your little heart goes out." She pats her heart.

"So that's what I want you to do.I think it enhances one's compassion but also your perception of life. What racism or hatred is not doing that. It's looking at a person and saying, 'That person is worthless. . . .' That's what all the hatreds are based on, the inability to project."

So there is Margaret Street, languishing in her husband's huge house in the Caribbean, applying salves and doing exercises, an idle white woman with a hideous past. But she's fascinating to us, even before we know her crime. And the reason is that Toni Morrison has projected.

How does she manage it?

"Isn't that what Christianity is?" she responds," -- that there's something in everybody that's redeemable? You don't just have the evil-ies and the good guys."

She talks of the leveling effect of a Christian communion ceremony, of everyone's partaking. "The butcher, the baker, the rich man, the poor man, the drunk, the prostitute. . . . You are all on your knees at the same time, and you're all trying to get the same blessing." A lot of people can quickly abandon this moment of equality as soon as it's over, she observes, and start looking down again on their neighbors.

But, "one way to do it is to become a grown-up, wide-spirited person . . ." she continues. "In the event that one doesn't, there are other ways to do it. . . . You can read."

You have a sense in her writing that she sees everyone in need of a blessing. Not that she lets Margaret off, or excuses Son's crime, or gives Jadine a break.

"I write a book in which all of the assumptions about what's good are there, but only by showing you, taking it apart, and putting it inside out so you can see what it is made of. Then if you still think this person's bad, this one's good, it's based on real information, rather than assumptions about who those people are."

"And I'm always very touched by them. I don't always approve of them, but I always enjoy their company, and miss them when I'm finished."

Read "Tar Baby," written by one grown-up, wide-spirited black woman.

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Unpaid Film Critic

“toni morrison: the pieces i am” (wendy moscow).

Posted by unpaidfilmcritic

June 20, 2019.  Nobel prize-winning writer, teacher, book editor and mother, Toni Morrison stands proudly as the latest in an ancestral line of African American women whom she remembers as having fearlessly confronted the world with a clear sense of who they were, despite having suffered horrendous indignities. These are the women who populate Morrison’s novels – “The Bluest Eye,” “Sula,” “Song of Solomon,” “Beloved” – written unapologetically in the language of the African American experience. Troubled by the cultural assumption that the reader is always white, she defied the norms of her time, writing stories with which Black people could resonate – unconcerned by the hegemony of the white gaze. Exemplifying this paradigm change, Morrison cites Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” an earlier novel whose white gaze is explicitly implied. “Invisible to whom?” she asks.

The new and splendid documentary “Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am” celebrates not only the author’s writing, but the many other facets of her accomplished life. Using interviews, archival film, photographs and artwork (oh, the artwork!) director Timothy Greenfield-Sanders paints a portrait of someone who, at 87, is warm, slyly funny, intellectually brilliant, sure of her worth and uncompromising in the face of injustice. Awed by the power of the word at an early age (especially having come from folks who, only two generations back, were not allowed to read and write), Morrison revels in the ability of books to change society and alter the stream of history. Her personal journey, from an Ohio steel town to Howard and Cornell Universities, to New York (as an editor at Random House raising two sons on her own) to her professorship at Princeton is told by Morrison herself – her rapport with the director (who is an old friend) readily apparent. She faces the viewer directly (as contrasted with the other interviewees, who speak at an angle to the camera), a directorial choice that privileges her narrative over the others and allows us to feel as if we are a guest at her table. She shares her wisdom with us on many topics, including the toll racism takes on the psyches of African American children (a theme explored with great sensitivity in “The Bluest Eye”), her initial marginalization by the white male literary establishment (which insisted on comparing her with other Black writers, their only commonality being skin color), the power of imagination to bring historical worlds to life, and her unsurpassed carrot cake.

I did not know that Morrison, in her time as a book editor, had nurtured the writing careers of Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali and other African American authors, especially women. Robert Gottlieb, her longtime editor, describes Morrison’s activism as being covert rather than overt. Not one for protests and picket lines, Morrison’s lifting up of African American life and culture in all its complexity in her own work, combined with her mentoring (and centering) of voices that had not yet been heard or taken seriously, helped to expand the literary canon beyond whiteness and maleness.

The interview with Gottlieb is one of a dozen beautifully shot, portrait-style interviews with an extraordinary group of Morrison’s colleagues and friends, including Oprah Winfrey, Fran Lebowitz, Angela Davis, Walter Mosley and Sonia Sanchez – their insights, anecdotes and humor providing additional layers to the chronicle of her life.

Another inspired directorial choice is the use of works by African American artists to tell the story of Black life in America, giving visual shape to the poetry of Morrison’s language. Interspersed throughout the film is Jacob Lawrence’s incredibly evocative “Migration” series, illustrating not only Morrison’s familial tale of having come up North (her description of her grandparents’ departure and the reasons for it is both chilling and riveting) but the Great Migration of so many Black people for whom the Jim Crow South had become untenable. Works by Kara Walker, Romare Bearden, Faith Ringgold, Charles White and others make palpable a people’s beauty, struggles and triumphs.

“Toni Morrison:The Pieces I Am” is visually stunning, from the opening neo-Cubist animated collage created by Mickalene Thomas showing the evolution of the writer’s face over time (a perfect metaphor for the idea behind the film), to the sparkling shots of a white sun-drenched pier against the serene blue of the Hudson River outside Morrison’s waterfront home, where she still writes in longhand on a yellow legal pad. And that writing continues to speak about what it means to be human in an imperfect world. Says Oprah Winfrey, “Toni Morrison’s work shows us through pain all the myriad ways we can come to love.”

“Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am” opens Friday, June 21st, at Film Forum, 209 W. Houston St. For more info, visit filmforum.com

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Posted on June 21, 2019, in Documentary and tagged Angela Davis , Beloved , Fran Lebowitz , Jacob Lawrence , Oprah Winfrey , Robert Gottlieb , Song of Solomon , Sonia Sanchez , Sula , Th Bluest Eye , Timothy Greenfield-Sanders , Toni Morrison , Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am , Walter Mosley . Bookmark the permalink . Leave a comment .

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Contested Boundaries: New Critical Essays on the Fiction of Toni Morrison (Women's Studies) (Hardcover)

• Description
• About the Author
• Reviews & Media
• American - General
• Women Authors

by Toni Morrison

A mercy essay questions.

Why is the Blacksmith such a disruption on the farm?

The Blacksmith is in complete possession of himself, free to think and act and move about as he pleases, and is a talented artisan who is paid for his work. All of that is disruptive because he is a free Black man in a society rapidly trying to demarcate the boundaries between the races in order promote white supremacy. His sense of self is appealing to Florens, who desperately wants love; confounding and initially offensive to Willard and Scully, white indentured servants who are not paid for their work; and ominous to Lina, who recognizes the potential destruction that will ensue from this threat to the closed community of the Vaark farm.

Is Jacob a "good" man?

Jacob is a nuanced character who is neither "good" nor "bad." The standards contemporary readers use to judge him are certainly valid, but Morrison also complicates easy judgement. Jacob is a good husband, though privy to standard patriarchal views on women (he will not tolerate a wife who "scolds"). He works hard alongside his laborers, who he seems to value. He owns slaves but treats them well enough; he sees Florens as an actual human being rather than property, respects Lina, and gives poor Sorrow a home when she had nowhere else to go. He does not approve of D'Ortega's flashy lifestyle and finds slavery as a whole cruel and disreputable.

Yet, when the opportunity arises for him to tap into some of that wealth, he puts aside his moral qualms and justifies his behavior since he will not have to be face-to-face with the enslaved labor force on the West Indies sugar plantations. Jacob is a product of his time, a decent man who is nevertheless weak-willed and worthy of our disapprobation.

What do we learn about 17th-century America from the characters of Willard and Scully?

Willard and Scully are white Europeans in indentured servitude, meaning they are contracted to work for a landowner for a set period of time and upon the close of that time, will ostensibly receive tools and clothes and a small plot of land of their own. While this sounds like a palatable option for landless European men, indentured servitude was characterized by strict rules, a frequent lack of the rights of Englishmen, easily lengthened sentences, and poor "freedom dues" at the end of the contract. Willard's antipathy toward the Blacksmith indicates the growing sense that white laborers should not suffer from similar conditions to those of Black people, who were increasingly almost always slaves, and, combined with his delight at actually being paid by Rebekka, shows us how this labor system was becoming less and less tenable.

Why does the farm begin to fail?

Obviously, Jacob's death makes it difficult for the farm to continue as it once did, but it was clear from the beginning that Jacob was not a good farmer, so there is something else at play. Valerie Babb suggests that "the Vaark farm is laid to waste by what dooms much in Morrison's work: an adherence to egocentric individualism, isolation, and removal from community." Lina had noticed there was a selfishness and a clinging to privacy outside of clan, so when Jacob dies, Rebekka has no one to turn to and begins to retreat inward into race privilege and religious orthodoxy; this results in the farm falling into disrepair, as she has no one to help her (except for, eventually, Willard and Scully when she agrees to pay them).

Why do Florens' act of writing in the house and its potential destruction by fire matter?

Florens uses words to tell her story, to reclaim a sense of self after her mother's abandonment, the Widow's closet, and the Blacksmith's cruelty shattered her. She tells the Blacksmith her truth and wrestles with her pain, refusing to let it crush her. And with the potential of destroying the abandoned edifice and all of the words, she can further cleanse herself. Critic Jennifer Terry writes, "Florens's writing of her life on the surfaces of Jacob's empty house, and the words' potential dispersal throughout the landscape via ash from a cleansing fire, offer a lingering vision in the penultimate section of the novel. The rich imagery of 'acres of primrose and mallow' and rainbow light closely echoes Lina's tale of the traveller whose response to such beauty is '[t]his is perfect. This is mine'"(62). However, Florens's inscription constitutes a revisionary African American voicing that too 'need[s] the air that is out in the world,' is as much a part of early America as the narrative of the male explorer or migrant."

A Mercy Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for A Mercy is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Which of the following best describes the main theme of the story:

It is better to talk things out than to misbehave.

Mercury’s Sandals

They all have step-siblings.

'"Who lives there?' sneered Primus. 'Pig herders? That's not a real city." (Paragraph 21)

Study Guide for A Mercy

A Mercy study guide contains a biography of Toni Morrison, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About A Mercy
• A Mercy Summary
• Character List

Essays for A Mercy

A Mercy essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of A Mercy by Toni Morrison.

• Love in Place of Protection
• On Motherhood and Mother Earth-hood: Ecological Constructs in 'A Mercy' and 'Silent Spring'
• We’re All in This Together: The Importance of Community as Demonstrated by Sorrow in 'A Mercy'
• Religion: Shaping Race and Racism in "On Being Brought from Africa to America" and A Mercy
• Discovering Personal Agency: The Position of Florens in A Mercy

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Trump Elevates a Conservative ‘Warrior’ on Education

Byron Donalds is best known as a Trump defender and potential vice-presidential pick. But in Florida, the congressman and his wife made a name — and a business — in the charter school movement.

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By Alexandra Berzon and Michael C. Bender

In early 2021, Representative Byron Donalds, Republican of Florida, and his wife, Erika, took the stage at an event hosted by the Truth & Liberty Coalition, a group that pushes to inject Christianity into public schools and other institutions and whose leader has described homosexuality as Satan’s work.

The couple was warmly welcomed as allies in the cause. Mrs. Donalds was singled out for opening a charter school in Florida. As a state legislator, Mr. Donalds had created a school voucher program that, in the words of one speaker, let children “get a biblical worldview education.”

Mr. Donalds addressed the group with characteristic humility. He is just a “poor kid from Brooklyn,” he said, who made good by doggedly pursuing his interests.

He urged the group to do the same: “Be bold.”

Mr. Donalds’s career is a testament to his advice. His interests — in overhauling public education, evangelical Christianity and electing Donald J. Trump — have propelled a rapid political ascent. A backbencher congressman in only his second term, Mr. Donalds, 45, has fast become a prominent surrogate for Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign and a conservative media regular, serving up earnest and on-message defenses of the former president.

Mr. Trump has taken notice. He has privately introduced Mr. Donalds as “the next governor of Florida,” and has spoken with advisers about the congressman as a potential running mate.

The national attention is less remarkable to those in Florida, where the Donaldses have spent years building a name — and a business — for themselves in the state’s white-hot battles over schools.

Mr. and Mrs. Donalds were early activists in an increasingly influential network seeking to transform traditional public education — in Florida and beyond. Long before the recent battles over book bans and critical race theory, the effort cast public schools as failing laboratories for liberal ideas and pushed to funnel public education funds into charter or private schools.

Mr. Donalds backed legislation that gave outside groups a bigger say in school curriculums, years before Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida set off a national debate by making it easier for groups to remove books from school libraries and limiting teaching about sexuality and gender.

The couple has deep ties to leading forces in those debates, including Moms for Liberty, Hillsdale College and the Florida Citizens Alliance, which has pushed to remove books that it deems inappropriate from schools. Both Mr. and Mrs. Donalds have made remarks disparaging homosexuality.

Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February, Mr. Donalds described heterosexual relationships as “the natural order that keeps society progressing.” In a tweet in 2017, Mrs. Donalds wrote, “Homosexuality is a sin just like any other sexual sin, and all of us sinners need forgiveness & mercy for our shortcomings.”

The couple’s work has been both advocacy and income. As Mr. Donalds pushed legislation expanding access to charter schools and voucher programs, Mrs. Donalds began to build a company and a nonprofit that took advantage of that expansion.

“Byron and Erika have been known for years in Florida as warriors in the fight for all children to have a quality education,” said Tina Descovich, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty, a conservative education group that began in Florida but has emerged as a political power broker. “That reputation is spreading nationally.”

As Mr. Trump campaigns, he has embraced the new education politics, suggesting that public schools have been overrun by “pink-haired communists” and promising to close the Department of Education if re-elected. And he has surrounded himself with like-minded supporters, such as the Donaldses.

Mr. Trump gave the congressman an enthusiastic welcome at a fund-raiser in Mar-a-Lago this month, saying that Mr. Donalds had “something very special out there politically” and that he was a favorite among his club’s wealthy clientele. “We have no poor people, which is the only thing I don’t like about Mar-a-Lago, you know — I like diversity,” the former president said while introducing Mr. Donalds, who is Black.

He has also publicly praised Mrs. Donalds, who is now an advisory board member at the Heritage Foundation, prompting speculation that she might be considered for a future administration post.

She knows “more about education than just about anybody I know,” he said at the Florida Freedom Summit last fall. “So stay handy,” Mr. Trump added, nodding to her in the audience. “Stay handy, OK?”

A conversion

Mr. Donalds’s interest in education policy stems from his childhood in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, he said in an interview. His mother was a public-school teacher and administrator. But she pulled him out of his public elementary school and sent him to private schools when she felt he wasn’t being challenged, he said.

“She thought there was more for me than just the public school classroom, and she was right,” he said. “School choice, it was always important to me because that was my life. Just to have the options, I think, is important for every child and important for families.”

It was Mrs. Donalds, whom he met in college, who drew him into evangelical Christianity. His full conversion came when he was 22, waiting tables at Cracker Barrel. He felt the call and “gave my life to Christ,” he said.

The couple settled in Naples, Fla., and became active in schools as they watched one of their children struggle at a public school, Mrs. Donalds has said. She was elected to the local school board. Both began working to open a charter school — a school funded by taxpayers but run independently.

In 2017, Mr. Donalds was sworn in to the Florida House of Representatives, serving a Naples-area district. That same year, Mrs. Donalds started OptimaEd, a charter school management operation.

The couple’s work often intersected. Mr. Donalds was a co-sponsor for a bill that, among many other things, allowed charter schools to secure additional funding from local tax initiatives. He backed term limits for school board members, a proposal that Mrs. Donalds had long sought as a way to force turnover and potentially open up seats for charter school advocates.

A couple with overlapping careers is common in Florida’s part-time Legislature. Rules for lawmakers are much looser than they are for local officials, who are more restricted when it comes to potential conflicts with family businesses, said Caroline Klancke, a former general counsel for the Florida Commission on Ethics.

“We weren’t funneling money directly to her,” Mr. Donalds said, referring to Mrs. Donalds. “We were setting up a programmatic change in the state of Florida.”

In 2022, Mrs. Donalds was managing several charters schools in Florida. According to contracts, her company was paid a share — around 10 percent — of the schools’ public funding to provide human resources, marketing and other services. That year, the company collected about $4 million in public money and put around $2.6 million back into the schools, public records show, while Mrs. Donalds was paid a salary of about $180,000.

Those figures became a source of tension with the schools. Since then, three charter schools managed by OptimaEd ended their contracts with the company amid complaints that it was putting too little money back into the schools, according to public records and three people involved in the schools who asked for anonymity to discuss private negotiations.

Mrs. Donalds did not respond to a request for comment.

She has increasingly focused her business on an online academy and virtual classes that accept vouchers. In 2017, her husband led a successful effort to offer the private school tuition reimbursements to students who said they were bullied. Last year, Florida went much further, expanding its voucher programs to all students, regardless of circumstances or income, and opening a new flow of public money to private schools.

Seeding the ‘parents’ rights’ debate

Advocates described how the couple had helped lay the groundwork for pandemic-era policies that put Florida at the center of the education debate.

In 2015, Mrs. Donalds started a network of conservative school board members with women who went on to lead Moms for Liberty. (Mrs. Donalds is a Moms for Liberty adviser.)

The Donaldses were some of the first members of the Florida Citizens Alliance, according to the group’s founder, Keith Flaugh. The alliance has pushed to remove books from schools that it claims indoctrinate children with liberal ideas, including Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” and other classics from African American authors.

Mr. Donalds has cheered on — and taken credit for — some of Mr. DeSantis’s education policies. After the Florida governor passed a high-profile bill allowing anyone to petition to remove a book from a school library, Mr. Donalds described the law as an extension of his work in the legislature.

Under pressure from schools, Mr. DeSantis recently rolled back his law, limiting the number of complaints that outsiders could make and noting that the process had been abused by outside groups.

These laws “denied many students access to education, and to important reading materials,” said Carlos Guillermo Smith, who was a legislator alongside Mr. Donalds and now advises Equality Florida, an L.G.B.T.Q. rights organization. “At the end of the day, none of this was necessary.”

Yet, in his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, an event that is often considered an audition for rising politicians, Mr. Donalds made clear that he was committed to his vision for schools.

“We’re going to fundamentally transform the United States government,” he said to applause. “The last major area where we truly need a resurgence in American leadership is in our culture, and it’s with our children.”

Alexandra Berzon is an investigative reporter covering American politics and elections for The Times. More about Alexandra Berzon

Michael C. Bender is a Times political correspondent covering Donald J. Trump, the Make America Great Again movement and other federal and state elections. More about Michael C. Bender

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Presidential Race: News and Analysis

After seven weeks of legal wrangling and tawdry testimony, Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan is in the hands of the jury , the final stage of the landmark case.

President Biden made an aggressive push to head off Trump’s modest gains among Black voters, condemning his Republican opponent as a racist .

An anti-Trump effort by Black faith leaders and activists signals that at least some of Biden’s critics on the left  will work to defeat his G.O.P. rival.

Sowing Election Doubt:  Trump has baselessly and publicly cast doubt about the fairness of the 2024 election  about once a day, on average, since he announced his candidacy.

Bringing Trump Into Focus:  For all the news that Trump makes, the Biden campaign is struggling to make the 2024 race about the former president .

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Lawlessness as an Election Issue:  In most U.S. cities, rates of homicide and violent assault are down significantly from pandemic-era highs. But property crimes have risen, fueling voter anxiety .